Short answer: not without writing a preprocessor extension.
The link you provided discusses MSI expressions. The WiX preprocessor is slightly different and doesn't have the substring operators (or bitwise numeric operators for that matter).
Question
Can I do the following and see if the configuration contains the word "Extra":
<?if $(var.MyProject.Configuration) >< "Extra" ?>
This link suggests I can use >< but it doesn't work for me. It compiles with this error:
error CNDL0162: An illegal number was found in the expression
Solution
Short answer: not without writing a preprocessor extension.
The link you provided discusses MSI expressions. The WiX preprocessor is slightly different and doesn't have the substring operators (or bitwise numeric operators for that matter).